Friday, October 23, 2009

"Popular Piety"

In medieval history we always have to read about medieval piety which my Mennonite Professor just sums up as 'superstition' (though somehow the bible is magic without it being superstitious).

Anyway, I guess I have become one of those nameless masses of Catholics going through the ages with their superstition, but I have to say I kind of am glad.

For a long time reading my bible was the only spiritually edifying experience I had. Then it became taking communion, then confession, but finally it has become my Rosary (which I find myself praying in lecture and taking everywhere), and reading Newman and Ratzinger. I'm going through Cardinal Newman's "Apologia Pro Vita Sua" and I will admit, he isn't the brightest theologian, but it is a good story as it were, and I find his sermons admirable, and his prose excellent.

Ratzinger is just the most thoroughly Christian man I think I've ever read about. I remember in grade ten laughing at our Catholic teacher in the Mennonite High School I went to because she was crying over the news of the death of the pope. I said "but isn't he the Anti-Christ?" (honestly I'm not making this up) and I received the strict glares of the other Anabaptists, I guess we weren't allowed to say what our theology taught in public.

Anyway Ratzinger - great theologian, very pious man, and not really a modernist or a traditionalist, just a man with huge biblical and patristic knowledge firmly in the Augustinian tradition (a nice compliment to the Neo-Thomists). So Papa Benny and my Rosary and soon to be St. John Henry Newman are swiftly becoming my popular piety (in addition to my Bible reading and everlasting debates with the Reformed).

Quotes For Thought

"If baptism is the beginning of my life, and the day of regeneration is the first of days, it is obvious that the words spoken when I received the grace of adoption are more honorable than any spoken since....Through this confession I was made a child of God, I, who was His enemy for so long because of my sins. May I pass from this life to the Lord with this confession on my lips." - St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, par. 26.

"To know Jesus and Jesus crucified is the sum total of my philosophy." - St. Bernard of Clairvaux

"Oh the extraordinary goodness of God toward man? The just of the Old Testament thank God in the weariness of long years; but that which they obtained, by means of a long and heroic service pleasing to God, Jesus gives to you in the brief time span of an hour. Indeed, if you believe that Jesus Christ is the lord, and that God had raised him from the dead, you will be saved and you will be introduced into heaven by the same one who introduced the good thief." - St. Cyril of Jerusalem

"He made us to believe in Christ, who made for us a Christ on whom we believe. He makes in men the beginning and the completion of the faith in Jesus who made the man Jesus the beginner and finisher of faith" - St. Augustine

"Nor must we trust in holiness of origin, in forefathers, or inthe gifts of God which we enjoy. We must look to the Word alone and judge thereby. Those alone who truly embrace the Word will be as immovable forever as Mount Zion. They may be few in number and thoroughly despised by the world, as were Noah and his children. But God, through these few, preserved to man the truth of that promised mastery when he had not even room to set his foot upon the earth." - Bl. Martin Luther "Commentary on Genesis"